LOOK AT ME, by Dustin Hoffman and Ariel Levy
The graduate is now a granddaddy. Eight times over.
In 1967, Dustin Hoffman drifted in on a moving sidewalk and, like a cup of instant coffee, gave the American leading man a boyish, jittery makeover as Benjamin Braddock in Mike Nichols’s seminal film.
Hoffman will be 90 next year. If not now for the big Hollywood memoir, when?
But his “Look at Me,” written with Ariel Levy of The New Yorker, has a glancing, elliptical quality such that one wants to append “… but Not Too Closely” to that commanding title. It’s only five pages longer than Levy’s 2019 collaboration with Demi Moore, “Inside Out,” though Moore is a quarter-century younger. That’s a lot of unexamined life.
The actor was 30 when “The Graduate” was released — the same age his father, Harry Hoffman, turned on Aug. 8, 1937, the day Dustin was born. With stars in Dad’s eyes, the boy was named for the silent movie actor Dustin Farnum.
Harry had driven west from Chicago during the Depression with his wife, Lillian, and her mother, a staunch widow nicknamed the Little Tank (her husband, a barber, had slit his own throat). Harry hoped to be a director and made it as far as head of the prop department at Columbia Pictures before getting fired and starting a furniture business that went bankrupt.
He was 5-foot-2, but towers over this story, verbally threatening and exacting about hygiene; he may have had obsessive-compulsive disorder. “He said there’s clean dirt and dirty dirt,” Dustin writes of being instructed to wash flower beds in the front yard with his older brother, Ronny.
A varsity football guard who became an economist and lawyer, Ronny was like Biff in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” and Dustin, who sobbed when he first read the play, identified with Happy, the flop.
Most of us get only one personal and professional apotheosis, if we’re lucky. Hoffman has had a pantheon of peaks — “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Rain Man,” for which he won Oscars; “Tootsie,” for which he should have — but channeling his father to play Willy Loman on both stage and screen might have been the sharpest. (“Wow!” Harry said obliviously in the dressing room after seeing this performance. “That guy is some loser.”)
Nicknamed Dustbin, knocked off his bike and called a “dirty Jew” by twin neighborhood bullies, the younger son developed a love of jazz and bonded with the Black students at Los Angeles High School. “I can’t overstate this: Nobody thought that I would ever amount to anything,” Hoffman writes. “No one suspected I might have any kind of intellect or talent. I was designated to be the failure in the family, and I accepted my role entirely.” He still considers his success a “freak accident.”
Hoffman took an acting class at Santa Monica College for the easy credit, discovered Tennessee Williams and found that for the first time girls, around whom he’d always been shy, were suddenly approaching him. At the Pasadena Playhouse, he met the then-unknown Gene Hackman and followed him to New York, where he roomed in Spanish Harlem with a group of underemployed aspiring actors that included Robert Duvall.
“This is a terrible thing to say, but this is a perfect day to pick up girls,” Duvall whispered to him the day John F. Kennedy was shot.
To get by, Hoffman cleaned toilets, temped for the Yellow Pages — he could type 90 words a minute — and sold toys at Macy’s. He jousted with the oracular Lee Strasberg in acting classes; studying human behavior at those odd jobs, and the works on other people’s bookshelves, would prove more valuable.
Back to the goils, though. Hoffman still uses the old-fashioned term “went with” to describe the dating habits of his old friends like Robert Evans, the big-personality producer he parodied in “Wag the Dog.” Small and insecure about his nose to the point that he used to back away rather than let romantic prospects see him in profile, he was astounded when “The Graduate” made him into a sex idol.
Women left him homemade soup on his doorstep and offered their breasts for his autograph on Fifth Avenue. Once, he was late for one of his five-times-weekly psychoanalysis appointments after sinning with a stranger under a tree in Central Park.
Hoffman’s first marriage was to the actress Anne Byrne, during which the townhouse next door blew up after a bomb accident caused by members of the Weather Underground. (He also survived third-degree burns during an earlier relationship, singing Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” on the hospital gurney.)
His second marriage, to a family friend named Lisa Gottsegen not too much younger, has lasted almost 50 years. This is rare enough in his industry that I had forgotten Hoffman got caught up in the big #MeToo sweep of 2017, with several women accusing him of very specific acts of sexual misconduct in the 1980s, including exposing himself to a minor. His attorney called the accusations “defamatory falsehoods.”
The actor equivocates about all this. He meanders from a discussion of the violent and misogynistic Sam Peckinpah movie “Straw Dogs” to the “demoralizing” beauty rituals he underwent to transform into Dorothy Michaels in “Tootsie,” to the bawdy sense of humor he shares with Lenny Bruce, whom he played in a 1974 biopic.
“The idea of taking something from someone sexually that they didn’t want to give … it’s just not something I’ve ever done,” he writes. “Or been tempted to do.” You want to put his relentless, shirtsleeved version of Carl Bernstein from “All the President’s Men” — the best movie about journalism of all time, by the way — on the case.
There’s dirty dirt, and there’s clean dirt. Like that Tom Cruise, his “Rain Man” co-star, made lemon pasta and rollerbladed with his kids. “He has a lot of energy,” Hoffman remarks. We got more from Oprah’s sofa.
Conscious of his own mortality, he remembers with affection departed colleagues like Robert Redford, one of the “walking surfboards,” as the “Graduate” screenwriter Buck Henry put it. The exquisitely profane Dame Maggie Smith once greeted him, “Dustin! My favorite Jew.”
A waning Laurence Olivier, whom Hoffman addressed as “Lordage,” provided the title for this book (shared with a wonderful novel by Jennifer Egan). Seeking attention is the reason one becomes an actor, Olivier believed. Attention absolutely must be paid to Dustin Hoffman, but “Look at Me” keeps our noses squashed against the glass.
LOOK AT ME | By Dustin Hoffman and Ariel Levy | Simon Six | 320 pp. | $35
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